The Bottom LineThe Mcody M20 is a stylish MP3 player that's super-slim and incredibly lightweight. Unfortunately it's quite hard to use and is very fiddly at times -- it might suit a tech-savvy commuter, but it's not a good choice for kids or technophobes

4.5 Overall

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Mcody's M20 is a really slim, flash-based MP3 player, which at £69 for the 2GB version, is pretty affordable.

We're all used to nice bright colour screens on our MP3 players these days, so why should this model, with its tiny black and white screen, steal your heart? The truth is it might not. But it may very well be cute enough to win a place in your jeans pocket, despite its navigational flaws.

Design
The M20 feels as light as it looks. It weighs about the same as a bag of crisps, and looks just as edible. It's a stylish, ultra-slim player that'll give minimalists a treat for both the eyes and fingers. The only downside to this slender design is that the player is permanently weighed down to one side by the headphone cable. We wish Mcody had set this socket into the top of the player to avoid this annoying characteristic.

Mcody has adopted the design aesthetic of Samsung's YP-K3, in that all the navigation buttons are touch-sensitive and invisible until touched. They can all be discovered by rolling a finger (providing it's connected to a living body) over the surface of the player. The buttons come to life with a furious red glow, and fade away shortly after you finish touching them. The only other button is a play/pause control, stuck oddly on the right-hand side of the device.

A small case and touch-sensitive buttons make for difficult navigation

Features
The minimalist M20 manages to pack some audio niceties into its tiny casing. We're pleased to see that along with support for MP3, WMA format music and Microsoft's DRM technology, the M20 supports music encoded into the open-source OGG format. There's no FLAC support but one out of two ain't bad, so we're not complaining. There's also a curious feature that allows you to speed up any MP3 track to as much as 150 per cent. Why, we have no idea, but it'll appeal to the kids if nothing else.

The black and white screen doesn't allow for photo support but it will -- albeit painfully -- display text files. Text size is large and restricted to just four lines on screen at once. Formatting is discarded and words are even split in half on to two lines in many cases. We can't think of a single practical use for this feature. In fact, we're barely comfortable calling it a feature as it adds nothing to the player.

There's a microphone inside the M20 that's perfect for recording voices. Also, using the supplied cable, it's possible to record CD-quality audio directly to the player's memory from any source that has a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. We got great results recording tracks from our iPod and from a television. The downside to this feature is that music is saved into the uncompressed WAV format, meaning that quality is going to cost you in megabytes. Lots of megabytes.

An FM radio is conveniently built into the player and although the auto-seek function is hopeless at finding more than one station, manually tuning to known frequencies is effective. It's a little slow to use but once locked on to a station the quality is excellent.

Performance
Transferring our 1.5GB test library of MP3s took a staggering 51 minutes -- over twice as long as the 22 minutes it took to transfer the same library to Sony's NW-A808. This won't matter if you don't often update your library but we had to leave ours over lunch until we could move on with our testing. That's something we're not used to. It was, however, kind enough to charge its battery over USB, which is nice considering there's no mains adaptor.